TLDR
- Lenovo CTO Tolga Kurtoglu said three forms of human intelligence are converging with AI and other digital capabilities to usher in the era of augmented intelligence.
- Connected, sensory and connectional intelligence plus AI will bring human prowess to the next level.
- The next stage is the development of AI agents to execute known and even anticipated tasks.
For the first time, three forms of human intelligence are converging with AI tools and capabilities to unleash a new era of augmented intelligence, according to Lenovo CTO Tolga Kurtoglu.
In a press pre-briefing before Lenovo Tech World 2024, he said this “interesting” moment in time combines AI and other emerging technologies with cognitive intelligence, sensory intelligence and connectional intelligence.
Connective intelligence: Cognitive ability, how we process and categorize information, form meaning, as well as how we understand and reason about the world around us.
“Throughout the years, we built tools to create information, share information and put that information to work. But today, the challenge is no longer about creating information but about managing information, because we’ve been bombarded with information,” he said As the information overflows, people’s lives become more complicated as they constantly switch between different inputs and tasks. Attention spans shrink.
AI and next generation technologies will remove much of this cognitive complexity and “frees our brains to do what we do best as humans,” Kurtoglu said.
Sensory intelligence: Technology that can track thousands of the body’s signals yields a rich source of data to open a new world of capabilities for AI and other digital tools. “Going forward, intelligent technology will thrive on this kind of physical and biological context as well,” he said.
Connectional intelligence: Humans are social creatures. AI and next generation technologies will uplevel socialization to a superpower. “We’re excellent at making connections, whether that’s with one another, whether it’s with the world around us, with information, with abstract concepts,” he said.
“What I’m seeing is essentially the convergence of these three types of intelligence and tools being built around us that is moving us from the era of artificial intelligence to the era of augmented intelligence,” the CTO said.
Augmented intelligence = AI agents
“Augmented intelligence is all about having different kinds of agents and companions around us that will be embedded in our full context, in human experiences, and they’re going to be helping us predictively,” he added. “They’re going to be helping us, for sensors to react to us. They will also connect us with the rest of the world. And it’s going … enhance and unleash the full human potential more completely, that’s kind of the future that we’re towards.”
The next step towards this vision is AI agents. To that end, Lenovo is developing AI agents that can become digital twins, for the individual and the enterprise. These AI agents will train on your data – or the organization’s data for enterprise AI agents – to learn about your likes and dislikes, history of activities and preferences. It will then act as a digital you, booking plane tickets, calling Uber and more.
For agents to “live up to their potential” they need three things: personal information (documents, images, videos, voice, etc.) and organizing it to be accessible in a digital format; information that will help them gain a deep understanding of us, such as likes and dislikes and behavioral patterns; and AI agents that can act on that information on our behalf.
“For the first time, AI isn’t just a generative knowledge base, a chat interface, but it’s a proactive tool that continues to learn and get better,” the CTO said. “It’s a true partner to use.”
Kurtoglu said Lenovo is building three basic technology pillars to enable an AI agent future: a knowledge base that integrates scattered information in a multimodal format; a technology engine to discern intent and proactively know the needs of the user; and task planning and execution. For the third pillar, the agents break down tasks into individual steps to get things done.
